Loverly

By T. E. K.

MY FAIR LADY

Book and Lyrics by ALAN JAY LERNER

Music by FREDERICK LOEWE

Yes, Virginia, there is a Broadway Santa Claus, and he has left your iridescent present at Manhattan's St. James Theater. It is called My Fair Lady, and not to worry or hurry, it will probably run from here to eternity.

It is difficult to think of My Fair Lady as a revival, since its words and songs are still in our memories. To see it again is to embrace a much loved relative who has inexcusably spent 20 years abroad. Nothing has diminished; this musical is one of the quintessential glo ries of the American theater.

Recently, in print, Producer Herman Levin asked everyone to perform a willed act of amnesia and forget that Rex Harrison ever played Professor Higgins and Julie Andrews played Eliza Doolittle. That is impossible.

Phonetic Retard. While still as elegant as it was before, My Fair Lady has changed in texture because of its principals. Harrison's brittle disdain matched Bernard Shaw's glacial unconcern for people as people. Ian Richardson, on the other hand, is too humane to treat Eliza as a phonetic retard. For him, she is an emotional event. Despite Shaw's impassioned lip service to English, he often treated it either as a handgun or a toy. Richardson treats it as the lineal descendant of Shakespeare. The text cannot always bear the weight of that sort of gravity and eloquence. As Eliza, Christine Andreas has the richness of voice that one associates with opera--and, alas, some of the same crimped acting range. She is a more warm-blooded woman than Julie Andrews, but considerably less of a flower girl or a lady. Perhaps it is difficult for an American actress to comprehend either. But like a windjammer, Shaw's imagination sails past all obstacles.

Repeating his original role as Pickering, Higgins' bachelor buddy, Robert Coote is delightful, and George Rose is "loverly" as Eliza's earthily vulgar father. The Lerner-Loewe score is incomparable, and the opening-night audience could scarcely wait for the first bar to applaud.

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